Greenstein TheoriesModernBible 2020

Chapter Title: Theories of Modern Bible Translation
Book Title: Essays on Biblical Method and Translation

Book Author(s): Edward L. Greenstein
Published by: Brown Judaic Studies
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Part Two
AND METHOD IN BIBLE TRANSLATION

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Chapter Five
Theories of Modern Bible Translation
The Sumerians saw it as a nasty prank by a trickster god.1 The Israelites
took it as the Creator's defense against the threat of human collaboration.2 It has
been derogated by some as a barrier to human fellowship and lauded by others as
an instrument for widening our perceptions. One mind. many languages - the
universality of the human faculty for language, the diversity of human speech.
Those who want to know what the other person is saying must learn that one's
language or get a translation. The vast majority of those who want to hear what
the Biblical God is saying take the latter alternative. The Hebrew Bible, or
portions thereof, has been rendered into nearly two thousand languaJes, and in
English alone Bible translation proliferates in hundreds of versions. To some
degree this trend may correlate with a growing impatience to learn a foreign
language. especially a classical one. But far more important seems the effort to
capture a greater measure of truth. Different translations bring various funds of
knowledge and insight to bear on the interpretation of the Bible, its meaning.
Each may offer a different slice of the truth. As everyone knows. each version of
translation means something different. Not only different understandings of the
text, but different methods of translating change the face of Scripture.
In the early 1960s Harry Orlinsky, the chief editor of the Jewish Publication
Society's new rendering of the Torah (the New Jewish Version or NJV), wrote of
a new "rage to translate - really to retranslate - the Bible."4 As it happened in
the Romantic period, when a surge in translating (the classics especially) was
accompanied by considerable attention to the art and nature of translation as an
enterprise,5 the recent wave of Bible translation has been joined by its proper
1See Samuel N. Kramer. "The 'Babel of Tongues': A Sumerian Version:· JAOS 88
�1968), PP· 10s.11.
This is only one aspect of the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11: 1-9).
3Cf., e.g. Salcae Kubo and Walter F. Spech� So Many Versions: 20th Century
English Versions of the Bible, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Academie Books, 1983).
4 Harry M. Orlinsky, "The New Jewish Version of the Torah: Toward a New
Philosophy of Bible Translation • ., Essays in Biblical Culture and Bible
Translation (New York: Ktav, 1974), pp. 396-417 [first published in 1963).
5Cf. A. Leslie Willson, "Introduction," in idem, ed., German Romantic Criticism
(New York: Continuum. 1982), esp. pp. xv.xvi.
• 85-

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86 Theory and Method in Bible Translation
companion and critic: the study of the theory of Bible translation. The subtitle of
Orlinsky's essay, "Toward a New Philosophy of Bible Translation." is only one
of many indicators of the self-consciousness that modem Bible translators bring
to their task. The merit of any translation rests not only on the skill of the
translator, but even more fundamentally upon the philosophy that underpins it.
Different styles of translating manifest divergent theories of translation.
It is customary to speak of translation types in terms of the polar
opposition of two styles. Such tidy categorizing oversimplifies a variety of
overlapping yet distinctive positions. The most widely used taxonomy pits the
literal mode - typically understood as a mechanical word-for-word reproduction -
against the idiomatic - or sense-for-sense. The first to articulate this opposition,
and the father of the idiomatic style,6 was Jerome, who translated the Bible into
Latin around the tum of the fifth century C.E. From Jerome on it has been
characteristic of those who classify translation types to choose sides and advocate
one over the other. The reasons that various proponents give often generate, or
are capable of generating, more finely shaded categories of translation style.
Some favor the literal mode as an earnest overture of love for words. The
words themselves must somehow be gingerly transferred from text to translation.
Notable among the advocates of relative literality are cenain authors, who belong
naturally to a class most apt to be enamored of words; and if one views literature
as the art of using words, one could with some justice refer to the more literal
type of translation as the more literary. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, for
example, translated Pushkin "into a rigorously literal and consequently rather
ugly English version" because he felt that only in this manner could one lead the
reader to the poem itself.7 John Berryman, the lyric poet, employed a fairly
literal style of rendering the Book of Job into English, contending that such a
translation would be "truer."8 Indeed, the literal mode of rendering served a
number of great Romantic writer-translators. The early twentieth-century German
poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, expressed a clear preference for a more literal
translation of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh Epic over a more recent but less
literal one.9 It is hardly coincidental that many Biblicists, as well as some
serious amateurs, who devote themselves to the literary analysis of Scripture
tend toward the more literal styles of translation.10
6 Cf.• e.g., Chaim Rabin. "The Translation Process and the Character of the
Septuagint," Textus 6 (1968), p. 16; James Barr, The Typology of Literalism in
Ancient Biblical Translations, Mitteilungen des Septuaginta-Untemehmens 15
�GOttingen, 1979), pp. 39-40. Jerome is discussed further in Chapter Seven.
Joel Agee, .. Pony or Pegasus." Harper's 263/1576 (September 1981), p. 76.
8 For references and discussion, see Chapter Six.
9William L. Moran, "Rilke and the Gilgamesh Epic," JCS 32 (1980), pp. 208-10.
10 cr.. e.g., Gabriel H. Cohn, Das Buch Jona in der Lichte der biblischen
Erzahlkunst (Assen, 1969); Hans Walter Wolffs translation of Jonah in his
Studien zum Jonabuch (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchner, 1965). pp. 84-89; Edward
F. Campbell, Jr., Ruth, AB 7 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975); J. Cheryl

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Theories of Modem Bible Translation 87
A work of literary art is essentially an arrangement of words, as music
comprises tones and silences and as sculpture comprises matter and space. If one
loses the words, one loses the art, just as one loses the music if one loses the
tones or the silences.11 But aside from a purist's devotion to words, there are
two other foundations supporting more literal translation. The one is stylistic.
The meaning of a Biblical passage may hinge on the repetition of a word or an
allusion. For example, in 2 Samuel 7 the word M':t "house,.. interweaves three
themes: King David had already established his kingship and was dwelling in a
royal house; the Lord, his God, was then dwelling in a tent.shrine, not in a
stationary house: David will build for the Lord a house. and the Lord will assure
the enduring prosperity of David's dynasty, which is expressed in Hebrew by M':t,
"house."12 The more literal rendering of the King James (or Authcrized) Version
(KJV) of 1611 translates n� consistently as "house" so that the literary device of
verbal repetition reaches the English reader.13 The more idiomatic rendering of
the British New English Bible (NEB) of 1970 ttanslates bayit as "housen when it
refezs to the king's palace or the future temple but as "family" when it refers to
David's dynasty. The superidiomatic Today's English Version (TEV, entitled the
Good News Bible) of the American Bible Society (1976) renders M':t as "palace,"
"temple;' and "dynasty" in its respective references, completely obliterating the
thematic connections of the origina1.14
Exwn, "Literary Patterns in the Samson Saga: An Investigation of Rhetorical Style

in Biblical Prose" (Ph.D. diss.• Columbia University, 1976); Michael Fishbane,
Text and Texture (New York: Schocken, 1979). more so in prose texts than verse;
Evelyn Strouse and Bezalel Porten, "A Reading of Ruth." Commentary 6112
(February 1979), pp. 63-67; Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist
Readings of Biblical Narratives (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); to a degree,
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Na"ative (New York: Basic Books, 1981) and
The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and cf. my **An
Equivocal Reading of the Sale of Joseph," in Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis with
James S. Ackerman, eds., Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narratives, Volume II
(NashviUe: Abingdon Press, 1982), esp. pp. 124-25. I am omitting here the
works of Martin Buber and Franz Rosnezweig, Everett Fox, and Reynolds Price
because I shall be discussing them below.
11 I shall take up the problem of whether the words of one language can be replaced
by equivalent words in the other below.
12ef., e.g.• Shimeon Bar-Efrat. w,pr.:0 "'11!)'0n l,o 'fflJlllii :l�.ffl [The Artful Shaping of
Biblical Narrative] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1979). p. 19.
13For an appreciation of the type of literalism represented in the KJV and
Renaissance Bible translations generally, see now Gerald Hammond, "English
Translations of the Bible,.. in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary
Guide to the Bible (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). pp. 647-66.
14The TEV is discussed further below and in Chapter Seven.
Moshe Greenberg argues similarly that ?tf'llr 'l:) must be rendered "sons of Israel"
and not "Israelites" in Ezek. 2:3 in order to reproduce its correlation with the
stubborn O'l:l, .. sons," of the following verse; 'The Use of the Ancient Versions
for Interpreting the Hebrew Text: A Sampling from Ezekiel ii 1 -iii 11," SVT 29
(1978), pp. 135-36; for another example, see ibid., p. 1 37.

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Before continuing the argument from style, we pause to note that this
argument dovetails with another of the oppositional classes of translation styles,
the fomi-oriented versus the content-oriented. It is necessary to state the obvious:
this opposition is recognized only by those, such as the idiomatic translators of
the American Bible Society,15 who see a dichotomy between form and content
in literature. The dean of American Bible Society translation, Eugene Nida,
speaks of an old-fashioned but, in his view, wrong-headed "delight in being able
to reproduce stylistic specialties, e.g., rhythms, rhymes, plays on words,
chiasmus, parallelism, and unusual grammatical structures." 16 Although Nida
acknowledges that in a literary work style makes a significant contribution to the
"impact" of a text,17 he holds fast to the principle that ltthe meaning must have
priority over the stylistic forms." 18 Style, literary form, are in this view
somehow distinct from "meaning. fl
In diametrical (theoretical) opposition to this JX)Sture is the modern concept

of art as the total assimilation of form and sense. This understanding had been
comfortably ensconced in early Romantic criticism, as the following statement
by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the nineteenth-century linguistic philosopher,
attests:
The work of art is fully a whole; it depicts an idea to us through a
particular form. Yet form and idea are so intimately united that they can
no longer be separated....In art, form is what is essential. 19
Meaning in literature entails tone, mood, attitude, feeling, the voice of a speaker.
not merely information. "Style," as an eighteenth-century French naturalist put
15 E.g., Eugene H. Glassman, The Translation Debate: What Makes a Bible
Translation Good (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1981), who contrasts
"form-oriented" and "content-oriented" translation styles as the "two ways of
translating"; esp. pp. 47-67.
16Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber. The Theory and Practice of Translation
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), p. 1. Nida's more recent writing has shown greater
appreciation of the more rhetorical features of discourse; see now Jan de Waard and
Eugene A. Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible
Translating (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986).
17Cited in Glusman, The Translation Debate, p. 17.
18Cited in ibid.• p. 57. Cf. Barry Hoberman, ''Translating the Bible," The Atlantic
Monthly, February 1985, pp. 43-58, esp. 55: "The point is that this definition of
translation centers on the concept of meaning; no importance has been attached to
reproducing the original text's sentence structure. word order, grammatical features,
and so on."
19Willielm von Humboldt, "On the Imagination," trans. R. R. Read III, in Willson,
ed., German Romantic Criticism, pp. 139, 152. Cf. the remarks of Ernst Behler in
the "Foreword" to this book (p. vii): "the early Romantic critics ...saw the poetic
unity of a literary work as an inner conformity with itself."

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Theories of Modern Bible Translation 89
it, .. is the man."20 In contemporary criticism the style is the an.21 It imparts
meaning to the whole by infusing the parts with thematic coherence. Psalm 19,
as Fishbane has shown,22 develops the motif of speaking in each of its three
segments.23 The motif is introduced in the very first verse:
The sky relates the glory of God,
of the work of his hands the vault tells.
The TEV buries the motif in its "idiomatic" rendering:

How clearly the sky reveals God's glory!
How plainly it shows what he has done!
The inseparability of form and content informed above all the translation method
of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who began to render the Hebrew Bible
into German in 1925, and it accounts in part for what at first blush has appeared
to many as a literal, word-for-word version. In their essays on Bible translation,
both Buber and Rosenzweig exploded the false division between content and
form.24
That style constitutes an essential component of the text is nowhere more
apparent than in repetitive patterns in which it is the fact and manner of
repetition, not the semantic content - which remains the same - that is the
point. With Gertrude Stein we may concede that "there is no such thing as
repetition, n25 for a stimulus has a different effect each time it is presented. For
example, a unique pattern in Biblical (and Ugaritic) prosody is the so-called
ttstaircase,tl a three- (or more) line figure in which the material of the first line is
20Georges de Buffon, cited in Alphonse M. de Lamartine, Cours familier de

litterature (Paris: Privately printed. 1856), vol. 2, p. 135; cf. pp. 137-39.
21Cf., e.g.• Susan Sontag, "On Style," Against Interpretation (New York: Delta,
1966), pp. 15-36. For a dissent. see, e.g., E. D. Hirsch, Jr., "Stylistics and
Synonymity.'' Critical Inquiry 1/3 (March 1975), pp. 559-79, who argues that to
say that style conveys meaning begs the question because one would first have to
know the meaning. The argument fails for its lack of understanding that in the
process of making sense one can hardly but consider phenomena that we
conventionally characterize as style.
22Fishbane, Text and Texture, pp. 84-90.
23Fishbane's analysis would be even stronger would he realize that Heb. ":J? f'l'll't in
Ps. 19:15 means "utterance of the throat." not "thoughts of the mind0 see H. L. ;
Ginsberg, "Lexicographical Notes," SVT 16 (1967), p. 80.

24See Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Sch.rift und ihre Verdeutschung
(Berlin: Schocken. 1936), esp. pp. 56, 113, 137. Cf. Everett Fox, "Technical
Aspects of the Translation of Genesis of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig"
(Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1974), p. 21. One wishes that Fox had been
careful not to dichotomize form and content in his review of the NJV Nevi'im
(Prophets), "Former Prophets or Formerly Prophets," genesis 2, March 1979, p.
10.
25Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 166-
67.

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interrupted, then repeated and completed or extended in the second line.26 It is

the suspense-producing interruption of the first line, in its position just prior to
the repeated material, that creates the effect. Consider the famous example in Ps.
92:10. The classic, more "literal" KJV renders:
For Io. thine enemies, 0 Lord
For lo, thine enemies shall perish;
all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered.
The "idiomatic" versions of the NEB and TEV render:

Thy foes will surely perish,
all evildoers will be scattered.
We know that your enemies will die,
and all the wicked will be defeated.27
They dissolve the pattern altogether.

A second basis supporting the literal mode of translation, in addition to the
stylistic, is anthropological. Instead of telling us how we would say it, a literal
translation tells us how they would say it. Reynolds Price, an American novelist
who has produc.ed conscientiously literal, direct renderings of some stories from
the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, renderings reminiscent of the Buber
Rosenzweig effort, stresses the importance of conveying in translation the
physicality, the sensuousness, of the original's language. "Failure to convey that
reality is failure to tell the story."28 Yet, the idiomatic camp would point to its
own work as the truly anthropological. A preeminent ancient Near East scholar,
A. Leo Oppenheim, contended that:
...scholars [who] translate...texts in a more or less 'oriental style' (often
imitating typical Biblical styles) in which the picturesque idiom does not
sound out of place and even adds ·color' to the alleged style of the
text...are simply wrong.2 9
He reasoned further that:
261 have analyzed the form and psychological effects of this pattern in "Two
Variations of Grammatical Parallelism in Canaanite Poetry and Their
Psycholinguistic Background," JANES 6 (1974), esp. pp. 96-105; and "One More
Step on the Staircase." UF 9 (1977), pp. 77-86.
27In contrast to the more "literal" translations of Ugaritic verse by H. L. Ginsberg
in James B. Pritchard, ed.• Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old
Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), see the more
"idiomatic" renderings of Michael David Coogan, Stories from Ancient Canaan
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978).
28Reynolds Price, A Palpabk God: Thirty Stories Translated from the Bible with
an Essay on the Origins and Life of Narrative (New York: Atheneum, 1978), p. 53.
29A. Leo Oppenheim, "Idiomatic Accadian," JAOS 61 (1941), p. 252a.

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...by resorting to literal translations. the translator indicates his own
refusal to accept the existence of a gap between the two languages and,
with it. of the gap between the two civilizations.30
It may be true that idiomatic translation can bridge the common ground among
cultures; but it is the more literal mode that brings out the distinctive
topography.31 A remarkably effective idiomatic translator, J. B. Phillips.
converts the literary conventions of Amos (1 :3) into contemporary English
expression:
This is what the Lord says:
Because of outrage after outrage committed by Damascus
I will not relent!
For they have battered Gilead,
They have threshed her with iron-studded sledges.32
But An American Translation, or the "Chicago Bible," which tends toward

literality, reproduces Amos' own idiom:
Thus says the Lord,
"For three transgressions of Damascus,
and for four, I will not tum back;
Because they have threshed Gilead
With threshing-tools of iron.33
We wouldn't say it that way, but Amos more or less did.

A more literal reproduction of imagery can often shed light on the realia of
an alien society. 34 Consider the following case, in which even the KJV
simplifies, and blurs, the realia of the imagery in Lam. 2:4a:
He [the Lord] hath bent his bow like an enemy;
he stood with his right hand as an adversary.35
300ppenheim, "Can These Dry Bones Live? - An Essay on Translating Akkadian

Texts," Letters from Mesopotamia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
p. 59. Cf. p. 58, where Oppenheim refers to his own perspective as .. the
anthropological. ..
31 See further Chapter Seven.
32J. B. Phillips, Four Prophets: A Translation into Modern English (New York:
Macmillan, 1969), p. 5. For a discussion of Phillips' method, see, e.g., E. H.
Robertson, The New Translations of the Bible (Naperville, IL: Alec R. Allenson,
1959), pp. 102-18; and Phillips' own "Translator's Preface.. in Four Prophets, pp.
vii-xxi.
33Edgar J. Goodspeed and J. M. Powis Smith, The Short Bible: An American
Translation (New York: Modem Library, 1933), p. 4. For a discussion of the
philosophy and method of this translation, see, e.g.• Robertson, The New
Translations, pp. 88-101.
34Cf., e.g.. Chaim Raphael, "The Prophets in Modem Idiom," Commentary 61/3
(March 1979), p. 71.
35Cf., e.g., the NJV; contrast the NEB, which alters the image: '*In enmity he
strung his bow ...."

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The Hebrew says ,rmp ,.,.,, "he stepped on his bow, which depicts the ancient
If
technique of grasping the longbow with one's left hand, securing it at bottom
with one's foot. and pulling the arrow back in the bowstring with one's right
hand.36 It is the "picturesque," contra Oppenheim, that actually represents "the
anthropological side.n37
The issue of anthropological authenticity has resurfaced most conspicuously
of late in the debate over sexism in Biblical translation. The imminent
publication of a revised Revised Standard Version by the National Council of
Churches has engaged controversy and anticipation in its reported efforts to
eliminate unnecessary male-oriented language in the Bible.3 8 Despite the
uncontested denotation of Hebrew to'M as "man," it is maintained that the word
merely refers to "a human being" in verses in which gender is not at stake.39 A
parade example is Ps. 1:1. The KJV had rendered:
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the \Ulgodly...
The TEV circumvents gender here by translating:
Happy are those
who reject the advice of evil men...
In principle the TEV opposes "any attempt to modernize the text,"40 but it
seems certain that the male-oriented language of the Hebrew Bible honestly
reflects the cultural perspective of those who first transmitted it. The concept of
"person,.. devoid of gender connotations, may not have been part of ancient
Israel's mindset, just as the concept of an integrated "universe," which the TEV
posits in Gen. 1:1, was not.41 The question once raised by a very popular
idiomatic Bible translator, James Moffatt, abides: "How far is a translator
justified in modernizing an Oriental book?"42
36For an ancient description, see Xenophon's Anabasis, Book 4. ii= The March
Up Country, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1964), p.
89.
37See above with notes 29- 0.
38Cf.• e.g. "Unmanning the 3Holy Bible," Time, Dec. 8, 1980, p. 128; "Plans for a
'Sexless' Bible Denied by National Council of Churches." New York Times. March
22, 1981; ..New Editions of Bible Provoke Controversy." New York Times,
November 29, 1981; for discussion, cf. Hobennan, "Translating the Bible.'' pp.
57-58.
39Cf., e.g.. Harry M. Orlinsky's lectures on "Male Oriented Language in Bible
Translation," reported in The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 15, 1977, and in Joh n s
Hopkins Magazine, March 1978, pp. 47-48; I heard versions o f this lecture at
New York University, Feb. 21, 1980, and on subsequent occasions.
40"Preface" to the Good News Bible (New York: American Bible Society, 1976),
no page.
41 See further Chapter Seven.
42Cited in Robertson, The New Translations, p. 74.

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Theories of Mooern Bible Translation 93
If the literal mode is taken to be the more literary type of translating, then
the idiomatic might be perceived as a "philological" style.43 The nature of
philology is to try to recover the basic sense of a foreign text and fix its
meaning as precisely as po�ible, usually for the sake of reconstructing ancient
history and a particular cultural milieu. The philological approach understands a
text primarily as a medium of information, and it seeks to transmit that
infonnation through an accurate, contemporary equivalent in the language of the
translation. Scientific discourse, or simply expository prose, nearly always
favors for both accuracy and efficiency an idiomatic translation mooe.
We may oppose to this the "literary" approach, which views the text as a
medium of sensibility. An outstanding representative of this school, Walter
Benjamin (d. 1940), in his "unequalled"44 essay on "The Task of the
Translator,"45 insisted that tta literary work" does not in any essential way tell
anything or impart information.46 It does, it is. In the "literary" view it is
perhaps more crucial to convey the rhetorical features of the text and the
manifold connotations of its words than it is to convey the denoted or ideational
message of the text. Philological translation endeavors to pin down meaning
while literary translation seeks, as in literary analysis, to proliferate meaning.4T
Ironically, one of the sharpest examples of philological Bible translation is
the recent rendering of Ruth by Jack S�son,48 whose commentary abounds in
fine literary observations.49 His method is almost point-for-point antithetical to
,.-iom
the literary translation style par excellence of Buber-Rosenzweig (see below). He
uses different English words to translate the same Hebrew word (e.g., in
1:3 is rendered "was left alone" but in 1:5 ttsurvived"). He uses the same English
word for different Hebrew words (e.g., "was Jeff' renders ,--m, in 1:3 while "leff'
renders l'Jni in 1:7). Combinations of words in the Hebrew are translated by a
single expression in English (e.g., m...,-,.,, in 1:1 is rendered "[he] migrated").
He rearranges verbal, even clausal, sequence for the sake of English idiom. Yet,
Sasson's commentary constantly betrays signs of his chiefly philological
43 De Waard and Nida. From One Language to the O ther, pp. 182-83, describe a
"philological" approach with respect to literalism, in attention to formal elements
of the source - what I call here the "literary., mode.
440eorge Steiner, "A Friendship and Its Flaws (A Review of Walter Benjamin·
Gershom Scholem Briefwech.rel... ), •• The [London) Times Literary Suppkmenl No.
4031 (June 27. 1980), p. 723. It should be noted. though, that Benjamin was
standing on the shoulders of Schleiermacher, Humboldt:. and others; see below.
45Walter Benjamin, *'The Task of the Translator," Illumina t ions, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken. 1969), pp. 69-82.
46Ibid., esp. p. 69.
47Cf., e.g., the theory and practice evinced in Roland Barthes, SIZ (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1974), esp. p. 7.
48Jack M. Sasson, Ruth: A New Translation with a Philological Commentary and a
Formalist-Folklorist Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1979).
49 Sce my review in '*Biblical Narratology," Prooftexts 1 (1981). pp. 201-8.

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interest. Through minute philological details Sasson makes a noble attempt to
recreate, even visually if possible, the specific sociological circumstances of the
Ruth narrative. He tries to paint in the background and disambiguate the
language. In both these efforts Sasson may be working at cross-purposes with
the story itself. But in any event the philological style of his translation
coordinates with the method of his commentary.SO
Now, although I have appropriated the label "literary" for the more literal
mode of translation, there are others who would argue the reverse: the most
literal method produces the least literary translation - using "literaryn to refer to
a translation that itself amounts to literature.51 The translation should employ
its own idiom to produce an "effect,"52 or "response,'*53 or "reaction"54
equivalent to what the translator judges the original to produce. A literal version
might yield effects quite different from those in the source. Among the more
recent idiomatic Bible translatorst seeking to reproduce the Hebrew's im�act, are
three American Jewish p:>ets. Stephen Mitchell - who has rendered Job, 5 David
Rosenberg - who has done Psalms, Job, and Isaiah,56 and Marcia Falk - who
has rendered the Song of Songs.57 Consider, for example, Falk's translation of
Song 1:1-2, which "aim[s] ...to uncover resonances" of the Hebrew that is "lost
in other translations"S8:
Oh for your kiss! For your love
More enticing than wine,
For your scent and sweet name -
For all this they love you.
Take me away to your room.
Like a king to his rooms -
We'll rejoice there with wine.
No wonder they love you.
50contrast Sasson's remarks on Marvin H. Pope's translation of the Song of
Songs in Maarav 1 (1978/79), pp. 177-96. esp. 181.
51Cf., e.g., Herbert G. May, Review of the Good News Bible, Interpretation 32
(1978), p. 189, who employs the opposition literal vs. literary. For a
sophisticated discussion, see Andre Lefevere, "Programmatic Second Thoughts on
'Literary' and 'Translation'." Poetics Today 2/4 (Summer/Autumn, 1981), pp. 39-
50. See further the discussion of K. Chukovsky's The Art of Translation in
Chapter Seven.
52Cf. H. L. Ginsberg, '*The New Jewish Publication Society Translation of the
Torah," JourMl of Bibk and Religion 31 (1963), esp. p. 188.
53Nida and Taber, Theory and Practice, pp. 1, 22-28.
54Olassman, The Tra,ulation Debate, p. '52.
sssee Chapter Six.
56David Rosenberg, Blues of the Sky (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Job
Speaks (New York.: Harper & Row, 1977); Lig htworks (San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1978).
S7Marcia L. Falk, Love Lyrics from the Bible (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1982). An
earlier version was published in 1977.
58falk, Love Lyrics, p. 6.

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One cannot deny the contemporary sensuality of Falk's verse. In order to achieve
it she was compelled to deviate from the Hebrew linguistic structure in a number
of ways. She changed third person to second person addre�; she introduced
enjambement; she replaced the feminine noun "young-girls" with the coy "they";
and she performed several semantic alterations. The original is literature; she
clearly feels the translation should be, too. The translator must compensate in
some artful way for the losses suffered in conversion from source to
translation.59
The literary-idiomatic translator, however, perpetrates an act of deception.
Translation is a cunning way of transforming a work of art. For while it turns
the work into something other than itself, it gives the semblance of having
changed the original barely at all. Conversions of art from one form into anothes
are familiar: poems and paintings into music, novels into films, films into
novelizations, even the plastic (a Grecian urn, say) into poetry.60 Music has
been transcribed from a piano arrangement into an orchestral score, and vice
versa. We even tolerate the reproduction of polychromatic paintings in black·and
white in a textbook. But in each of these examples the transfer from one form to
the other is obvious; we are made aware of the fact that each conversion creates a
different work - or a pale replica, a xerox - of the earlier one. In the translation
of a work from language to language the metamorphosis is disguised, an
impersonation. An idiomatic translation does not switch the medium of
representation. Since most readers of translation are not conversant with the
source language, they cannot measure the gap between the original and its
surrogate. This is not so with respect to the other types of artistic conversion,
from medium to medium. The difference between a performance by piano and
one by full orchestra is clear even to the tone-deaf. The distinction between a
painting and a photograph is evident even to the blind (who can by touch alone
feel the difference). In such conversions the perceiver either has a continual sense
of experiencing a transfer or reproduction or realizes that he or she is
experiencing a different work of art. But the experience of reading, or hearing, a
text is similar, whatever the language - especially if the translation of a poem,
say, consists in another poem. In considering this fact, Serge Gavronsky has
termed idiomatic/literary translation "cannibalism." He explains:
59See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London:
Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. pp. 395-413; cf. Falk, Love Lyrics. p. 54.
60By citing such conversions I do not mean to imply that they produce
equivalence. I am sympathetic to the following remarks of Myles naGopaleen
(pseudonym of the novelist Fiann O'Brien. pen-name of Brian O'Nolan): ..There
can be a /usion of artistic activities directed towards the communication of a
single artistic concept. Example: a song - a poem sung to an air. But is artistic
function interchangeable? Can a play be made a novel? Some people are
chronically incapable of appreciating a thing in terms of itself"; The Best of
Myles, ed. Kevin O'Nolan (New York: Penguin Books, 1983). pp. 38-39.

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The use of this term emphasizes the disappearance of the slightest trace
of the .. original" qua original, and the presentation of what the
"innocent" reader might consider as a perfect text in itself, and not as an
Introduction-text, through which one can still reform the semantic,
syntactical and grammatical structure of the departure [i.e., source]
tongue.61
Idiomatic translation wishes to serve the audience with a poem that it can
experience as a poem. In fact, one can recast the opposition between literal and
idiomatic translation style as that betweeen author-oriented and audience-oriented
translation. As the German Romantic Friedrich Schleiermacher put it, in his
epoch-making essay "On the Different Methods of Translation": tlEither the
translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader
towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves
the author towards him."62 The author-oriented translator will produce a version
that is liable to appear slavishly literal as one attempts to copy each linguistic
and literary maneuver of one's source. The Buber-Rosenzweig rendering, for
example, has been lambasted as "u�ble,"63 erecting "a barrier between the
reader and the meaning of the texL" The idiomatic, audience-oriented translator
recoils from the "unnatural"65 output of literality. The American Bible Society
worries over "discourag[ing) the reader from attempting to comprehend the
content of the message" because the translation presents it in a difficult fonn.66
"The new focus," they say, "has shifted from the form of the message to the
response of the receptor. "67 In such a view, the task of the Biblical translator "is
to communicate the truth of the Biblical message in the idiom of his language"
[emphasis mine].68 The alternative, to retool the audience to learn to interpret
the translation and become better acquainted with the style and idiom of the
source, places burdens on both translator and audience. The translator must
forsake one's literary freedom and remain shackled to the idiom of the other's
voice. The audience can negotiate a literal rendering only through efforts greater
than those required by texts of comparable complexity in its own language.
Buber and Rosenzweig, whose first collaboration began in opening a center for
61 Serge Oavronsky, *'The Translator: From Piety to Cannibalism," Sub.Stance No.
16 (1977), pp. 53·62; here, p. 59.
62Friedrich Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods of Translation," trans. A.
Lefevere, in Willson, ed.• German Romantic Criticism, pp. 1-30; here, p. 9; cf.
Rosenzweig, in Die Schrift, p. 89.
63Cf. Falk, Love Lyrics, p. 60.
64Ralph P. Kingsley, .,The Buber.Rosenzweig Translation of the Bible," CCAR
Journal 11/4 (January 1964), p. 22.
6Sff. L. Ginsberg, ''The New Translation of the Torah, II. In the Path of True
Scholarship.'' Midstream 9/2 (Jwie 1963), pp. 75 .86, esp. 76.
66Nida and Taber, Theory and Practice, p. 2.
67 Ibid., p. 1.
68 A. C. Partridge, English Biblical Translation (London: Andr6 Deutsch. 1973), p.
1.

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adult Jewish education, wished to transform the audience, to lead them to the
text.69 In an extreme posture, one which Buber and Rosenzweig would never
have respected, Walter Benjamin held that "no poem is intended for the reader,"
so audience-oriented translation would make no sense at all.70
The audience-oriented, idiomatic translators have two chief. intertwined
concerns. They believe in the purity not necessarily of Language but of
particular languages. Translations must read well and sound welt71 A German
translation must be in good German, an English one in good, contemporary
English. After a text like the Bible has been rendered into another language
repeatedly, as in the case of the ancient Greek translations of the Hebrew
Scriptures, a specialized language for translating the text develops, a ..translation
language."72 Translation languages of the Bible inevitably pick up linguistic
and stylistic features of the Hebrew, acquiring a Hebraic character. It happened to
the English of the Tyndale7 3 and King James versions74 ; it happened to the
German of Martin Luther's Bible translation.75 Idiomatic translators seek to
crack the brittle crust of Hebraic style, of barbarism, to achieve a flawless native
looking veneer.76 Older English Bible translations, and the RSV of 1950.,77 for
example, imitate Hebrew word order and syntax to a degree that makes them
sound classical - or "quaint."78 The valuable literary effect of such literalism is
69Cf. Fox, "Technical Aspects," p. 21. For a fine recommendation of the author
oriented approach, see Agee, "Pony or Pegasus" (see n. 7 above).
70Bcnjamin. "The Task of the Translator.'' esp. pp. 69-70.
71Cf., e.g., the preface to The Bible: An Alm!rican Translation, cited in Robertson,
The New Translations, p. 95; the first principle of the NEB. cited in F. F. Bruce,
History of the Bible in English, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), p. 237; Charles R. Taber, ''Translation as Interpretation," lntttrpretation 32
(1978), p. 131; de Waard and Nida. From One Language to Another, p. 39.
72Cf. Rabin, "The Translation Process" (sec n. 6), esp. p. 8.
73Cf., e.g., George Steiner, "The Book," Languagtt and Silence (New York:
Atheneum, 1977). esp. pp. 189-90.
74Cf., e.g., Bruce, History of the Bible in English, p. 121. C. H. Sisson puts it
more broadly: "[The local tradition of the Bible translation and Prayer Book]
is...the funnel through which foreign influences, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French,
Spanish. Italian and Gennan, have played upon those who have written in English
in [Great Britain]"; "The Prayer Book Controversy: An Insular View," in Michael
P. O'Connor and David N. Freedman, eds., Backgrounds for the Bible (Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987), pp. 497-98.
75Cf., e.g.• Rosenzweig's brilliant essay, "Die Schrift und Luther," Die Schrift, pp.
88-129.
76Cf., e.g, Ginsberg, ''The New Jewish Publication Society Translation," esp. pp.
187-90; Bruce, History of the Bible in English, pp. xi, 15-16; Glassman, The
TranslaJion Debate, p. 57; Falk, Love Lyrics, pp. 57-58.
77Cf., e.g., Millar Burrows, "The Revised Standard Version of the Old Testament,"
SVT 1 (1960), esp. p. 210; Keith R. Crim, "Old Testament Translations and
Interpretation,•• Interpretation 32 (1978), p. 145.
78Cf., e.g.• Ginsberg, "The New Translation of the Torah," esp. p. 83.

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to present the audience with images and concepts in their original sequence.79
(Imagine reversing the notes of a melody or the frames of a film.) The NJy,80
and most other recent English translations, abandon any adherence to Hebrew
word order because in their view an English translation must employ English
sequence.
Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the idiomatic/audience-oriented
approach is that such a method serves the author best, too. The thinking runs:
this is how the author would have said it bad he said it in English, say, and not
in Hebrew. An exponent of the idiomatic method views translation as "an
equivalence of thought which happens to be expressed verbally in a variety of
ways." 81 This assumption should not be taken as a given. The great author
oriented philosopher, Schleiermacher, argued the contrary: language articulates
thought. If one language expresses something different from the idiom of another
language, the concepts being expressed in the different languages are also
different. One cannot say the same thing in the other language using the foreign
idiom of that language. 82 It is becoming apparent that, as George Steiner has
definitively demonstrated in After Babel, different translation styles rest upon
divergent philosophies of language.83 We shall expand on this topic below. We
shall see that in opposition to the stance committed to linguistic purity is a
philosophy that insists on warping the language of a translation in conformity
to the contours of the source and thereby enhance its expressibility.
Besides linguistic purity, the idiomatic/audience-oriented approach betrays a
second, related concern: evangelism. The Word of God must speak every
language. Practically all idiomatic translations enunciate this purpose.84 The
American Bible Society seeks not only to make the Scriptures t'intelligible to
Christians" but also "to non-Christianstt so that ttthe translation of the Bible"
can serve "as an [effective] instrument of evangelism.''85 Herb and Judy
79Cf. Price. A Palpable God, pp. 56-57.

80cr., e.g., Jeffrey H. Tigay, "On Translating the Torah:' Conservative Judaism
26n, (Winter 1972), esp. pp. 15-16.
81Glassman, The Translation Debate, p. 75; cf., e.g.• Nida and Taber, Theory and
Practice, pp. 4-5.
82Schleiermacher, "Different Methods," esp. p. 20. Cf. the view that every
translation of literature produces a new literary work; see, e.g., Jose Lambert.
"Literary Contacts and Translation: Theoretical vs. Descriptive Studies," Hasifr11.t
25 (1977), p. 30 [ in Hebrew].
83See esp. Steiner, After Babel, p. 47: ''A study of translation is a study of
language." The entire monumental book serves to elaborate on that remark.
84Cf., e.g., the Preface to the NJV Torah; the first memorandum circulated to the
NEB committee. cited in Robertson, The New Translations, p. 177; the Preface to
Taylor's Living Bible, cited in Robert G. Bratcher, "One Bible in Many
Translations," Interpretation 32 (1978), p. 124; the Preface to the revised KJV
published by Thomas Nelson Inc. (Nashville, 1979), p. iii; Glassman, The
Translation Debate, p. 51 and passim.
85Nida and Taber. Theory and Practice, p. 31.

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Zimmennan of the Evangelical Free Church of America will have spent over
twenty years to produce a Bible translation in a north Canadian Indian language
for a community of only 2,500.86 It is hard to avoid the impression that
Christian evangelical translators view what they call the "new." idiomatic
method of translating as the supplanter of the ..old,.. literal, Hebrew.laden style
much as the Church understood the ascendancy of the "New" over the uOldu
(read: antiquated) Testament. It is better, truer, an irreversible advance.87 The
"new" method attempts "to reformulate [the] message [of Scriptme] within a
completely new linguistic, historical, and sociocultural environment. ..gg
In one of his essays on Bible translation Martin Buber drew a similar
connection between the surrender of Hebraic constructions and the various efforts
to adapt the text to a new audience.89 Buber, of course, waxed ecstatic over the
"diction, sentence structure, and rhythmic cadence" of the Bible's Hebrew and,
with Rosenzweig, sought to restore an audience to the Hebrew voice of the text.
They could reasonably only contemplate a Jewish audience. Throughout history
the Christian church has always heard its Scriptures in translation while the
Jewish synagogue has chanted its Bible in Hebrew.90 Rosenzweig feared ..that
the Germans won't stomach [Buber-Rosenzweig's] extremely un·Christian
Bible."91 Indeed, it might not be too drastic a simplification to label the
Hebrew-literal style of translation Jewish in contrast to the idiomatic,
evangelical, Christian mode.92
86Reported in the New York Times, Feb. 1, 1981, p. A14.

871 feel convinced of this perception even though Harry Orlinsky of the NN
committee likewise hails the "new" approach to translating; see references in
notes 4 and 39. Cf., e.g., the following dismissal of Jewish literalism as no less
than "idolatry" in an excerpt from a recent United Bible Societies publication,
prefaced approvingly by Eugene Nida: .. [The belief that God sought to
communicate with the Israelites verbally] gave rise to Israel's strong reverence for
and devotion toward the Word of God, the sacred Scriptures - an attachment that
unfortunately later developed (wtder the strict instruction of Jewish sects such as
the Pharisees) into what amounted to an attitude of idolatry. Thus the literal form
of the Word was transformed into an object of worship [sic!], while its meaning
was lost in the process (Matthew 15:6-9)"; Ernst R. Wendland, The Cultural Factor
in Bible Translation (London: United Bible Societies, 1987). p. 12.
88Wendland, ibid., p. 31.
89See Buber's "Ober die Wortwahl in einer Verdeutschung der Schrift," Die Schrift,
e�. pp. 137-38.

90ct. David Stem, "Translating the Ancients," Commentary 5 /6 (June 1975), esp.
9
p. 45. De Waard and Nida, From One Language to Another, p. 23, imply that this
practice has authoritative early Christian precedent: "For New Testament writers
the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament was regarded as valid as the
Hebrew."
91 Rosenzweig, cited in Nahum N. Glatter, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and
Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken, 1961), p. 153.
92Cf. also Buber, "Biblical Hwnanism," On the Bible, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New
York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 211-16. Cf. also Robertson, The New Translations,

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After all, Jewish exegesis of Scripture has traditionally found great
significance not only in the sense of the text but quite as importantly in its
configurations of Hebrew phrases, words, even letters. For classical midrashic
interpreters the text was read not as a continuous semantic message, which could
be grasped only in chunks of sense, but was decoded according to atomized units
of various sizes, sometimes as small as the shape of a letter.93 The midrashic
premium on the sacred significance of every letter of Scripture had its parallel in
the ancient Jewish translations.94 The ancient rabbis displayed an understandable
antipathy to any sort of Bible translation. But the translations that were produced
- and the Greek one by the proselyte Aquila in particular95 - endeavored to
transfer word for word, particle for particle, each meaningful component of the
original. Partly this resulted from the translators' uncertainties in interpreting
Hebrew expressions. Rather than parse a difficult form or explain an unfamiliar
idiom, they would noncommitally render element for element, leaving it to the
reader to figure out the sense of the whole.96 Mostly, though, they took pains
to preserve every potential signifier in the text, every nota accusativi (rM particle)
for example,97 because it is all crucial to the divine revelation. For Aquila, "the
Hebrew text represents a mosaic which must be left unchanged, except for the
pp. 165-75, esp. p. 170, on Hugh Schonfield's "Jewish flavor" in rendering the
Christian Scriptures. I do not mean to imply that a tendency to literalism was
exclusively Jewish in the ancient world. In opposition to the classical trend to
render idiomatically, or sense-for-sense, there was another tradition of rendering
word-for-word, especially when dealing with sacred texts; see Sebastian Brock,
"Aspects of Translation Technique in Antiquity," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine
Studies 29 (1979), pp. 69-87. Nor do I deny that Jewish scholars, especially in
Medieval Spain, opted for the sense-for-sense translation mode (under Arabic
influence? see Brock, pp. 74-75). Cf.• e.g., these remarks of Moses ibn Ezra: "If
you come to translate anything from Arabic to Hebrew, take only the idea and the
intent and do not translate word for word. for all languages are similar to one
another...You would do well to convey the idea of the source with more apt words
than you will find in the language of the translation"; Shirat Yisra'el, trans. from
the Arabic by Ben-Zion Halper (Leipzig: Stybel Publishing, 1924), p. 132.
For the Christian approach to translation as characteristically evangelical, cf. de
Waard and Nida, From One Language to Another, p. 20.
93Cf., e.g., Yitshaq Heinemann, nil'n ,:,.,, [The Ways of Midrash], 3rd ed.
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1970), pp. 100-7.
94Cf., e.g.. ibid., pp. 169-72; Nechama Leibowitz, Die Obersetzungstechnik der
judisch-deutschen Bibelubersetzungen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts dargestellt an
den Psalmen (Halle, 1931), pp. 1-2.
95See esp. Dominique Barthelemy, Les devanciers d'Aquila, SVf 10 (1963), pp. 3-
30 ("L'hermeneutique d'Aqiba et son influence sur Aquila"); cf. also Barr, The
Tlfology of Literalism; Leibowitz, Die Obersetzungstechnik, pp. 9-11.
9 Cf. Barr. The Typology of Literalism, esp. p. 42; Rabin, "The Translation
Process," pp. 23-24; Harry M. Orlinsky, "The Septuagint as Holy Writ and the
Philosophy of the Translators," HUCA 46 (1975), esp. p. 104.
97See esp. Barthelemy, Les devanciers d'Aquila, pp. 11-15.

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replacement of its Hebrew 'stones' by Greek ones."98 Since the revealed text
encodes its meanings in the merest elements, every characteristic of the Hebrew
must find a corresponding one in the translation.99 That such attention to the
text's Hebraic properties is distinctively (though not exclusively) Jewish has
been recognized by Barr: ttThe sort of devotion to the fonns and patterns of an
original language implied by it was such that it was not likely to become much
developed except among Jews."100 Indeed, it is doubtfully a coincidence that the
first to render the Bible idiomatically was the great Church father, Jerome.IOI I
do not mean to imply that Christian translations of the Bible have not been
literalistic.102 Early English translations, notably those influenced by John
Wycliffe, were extremely literal- but Latinate, not Hebraic.103 They were based
on Jerome's Vulgate. When I speak of "literal" in this regard, therefore, I mean
"Hebrew-literal."
The rigidly literal method of Jewish translation, in which each element of
the Hebrew is somehow conferred, probably harks back to the oral, simultaneous
procedure of translation in the ancient synagogue.104 Simultaneous translation
tends to follow a mechanical stimulus-response, one-for-one correspondence
model. This pattern of element-by-element rendering continued in use by Jewish
schools of the traditional type right up through our century.105 The first Jewish
translation to break the pattern was the important late eighteenth century
rendering by Moses Mendelssohn, who wanted to provide German Jews with a
Bible in fluent, idiomatic Gennan, to launch them into the stream of secular
culture.106 The literal mode did not resurface among Jews in any meaningful
way until Buber and Rosenzweig. Their literalism has with some justice been
compared to the word-for-word methods of the ancient literal versions.107
98Katz, cited in Barr, The Typology of Literalism, p. 37. For classical Greek
antecedents of such a practice, see Brock, "Aspects of Translation Technique," pp.
81-82.
99Cf. Leibowitz, Die Obersetzungstechnik, p. 1; Orlinsky, "The Septuagint as
Holy Writ," p. 103; Carr, The Typology of Literalism, pp. 31-32.
l OOJbid., p. 46.
tot For some ambivalence about idiomatic/literal translation among the Septuagint
translators, see Brock, "Aspects of Translation Technique," pp. 71 -72.
102Cf. Hammond, "English Translations of the Bible" (n. 13 above).
103cf. Bruce, History of the Bible in English, pp. 12-23, esp. p. 15.
1 04 Cf. Rabin, "The Translation Process," p. 18; Avigdor Shinan, "Live
Translation: On the Nature of the Aramaic Targums to the Pentateuch," Proo/texts
3 (1983), pp. 4149. Brock, "Aspects of Translation Technique.'' explains the
word-for-word translation style as a result of concern to render legal detail. It is
possible, of course, that both factors affected the development of the more literal
mode of translation.
105cr. Leibowitz, Die Ubersetzungstechnik, pp. 11-16.
106cr. ibid., p. 17; S. Billigheimer, "On Jewish Translations of the Bible in
Germany," Abr-Nahrain 1 (1967-68), p. 3.
107Cf. Leibowitz. Die Obersetzungstechnit pp. 9-11; Barr, The Typology of
Literalism, pp. 8-9.

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However. as the following pages will make clear, Buber and Rosenzweig's
methods were not of the same literalism as that of their ancient and medieval
predecessors. And, more important, their methods derived from literary and
linguistic philosophies that were of a different nature from the traditional,
theological rationale.
Before turning to the relations of translational styles to distinctive
philosophies of language, let us sum up our discussion of the· various
permutations of the literal vs. idiomatic opposition. Alternative modes of
translation do different things and serve different functions.108 More literal
translations can cover a wider spectrum of literary features; idiomatic renderings
can depict the historical denotations of the text with greater clarity. While the
idiomatic style can present a culture to us in familiar terms, a literal rendering
can disclose the more idiosyncratic aspects of that culture. One may liken the
idiomatic mode to the cle.ar voice of a speaker reciting someone else's message in
one's own language. The literal translation resembles the voice of the author, but
muffled. The author's sense may be difficult to discern, but the reader who
wishes to hear it will make the requisite efforts.
Rabbi Judah says: "He who translates a verse according to its form - this
one is a fabricator. And he who adds to it - this one deforms and
diminishes it." 109
Of the modern Bible translations. only two sets are grounded in developed
philosophies of language and translation: those of the American Bible Society
(ABS), such as the superidiomatic TEV, and the Hebraic renditions of Buber and
Rosenzweig. Both share a general philosophy of language holding that the
human mind universally possesses a common apparatus of thought and a
common linguistic structure. Different languages transform that basic underlying
structure's meaning into various surface forms. This broad position - within
which is a kaleidoscope of diversity - contrasts with another, represented most
famously by Nietzsche,11O maintaining that the structures of language constrict
l 08cf., e.g., the admirable discussion of the problems of translation in John

Bright, Jeremiah, AB (Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1965), pp. cxixff.
109Tosefta Megilla 4:41. For variety in ancient Jewish Bible translation, see, e.g.,
Barr, The Typology of Literalism,· and Michael L. Klein. "Converse Translation: A
Targumic Technique," Biblica 51 (1976), pp. 515-37.
110cf.. e.g .• Arthur Danto. Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1965), pp. 12, 83-89, 96-97, 106, 123-24; George Steiner,
"Silence and the Poet," Language and Silence (n. 73 above), pp. 36-54, esp. 44.
See, e.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense:• in
Mark C. Taylor, Deconstruction in Context: Literature & Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 216-19; see also Basic Writings of
Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufm8JUl (New York: Modem Library, 1968), pp.
406-7.

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the processes of perception and thought111 One issue at stake between the two
positions is the problem of privacy in language: How do I know that what I
mean by saying x and what the other person means by x are really the same
thing? 112 How do I know the answer to the question posed by Jorge Luis
Borges: "You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?" l13 Both
the ABS linguists and Buber and Rosenzweig believe in the possibilities of true
communication. But their philosophical differences led them to antithetical
views of translation.
The simpler theory is that of the ABS. They hold that languages are
essentially alike, that any language can in some way express that which any
other language can express, that the synbols of language suffice to verbalize
experience and thought, and that the underlying linguistic structure of an
utterance corresponds directly to the speaker's concept.114 It is a modified
version of Noam Chomskfs transformational-generative grammar.115 Based on
these philosophical assumptions, the procedure for translating that Nida and
Taber describe is, concisely. as follows.116 The translator analyzes the source
text with respect to its semantic and grammatical relations. Then one transfers
the decoded message into one's own mind. Finally. the translator must
restructure the message in the forms of the translation-language.
l l l On this bipolar contrast of linguistic philosophies, cf. Steiner, After Babel, pp.
73-74.
112For a would-be solution to this problem. see Willard V. Quine, "Meaning and
Translation,.. in Jerry A. Fodor and J. J. Katz, eds.• The Structure of Language:
Readings in the Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice.Hall, 1964),
pp. 460-78. There are a number of problems with Quine's argument. One is that he
deals only with certifying whether two speakers are denoting the same thing;
sameness in connotation is not verifiable by his procedure. A second is: even if
we could verify that my statement refers to the same thing as yours does, how do
we know that our language directly represents our thoughts? For a mentalist's
critique of Quine, cf. Jay F. Rosenberg, Linguistic Representation (Boston: D.
Reidel, 1974), pp. 49-71.
113Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel," Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan
(New York: Grove Press, 1962), p. 87.
114Cf. Nida and Taber. Theory and Practice, pp. 4-5. 19-20, 23 and passim; Taber,
"Translation as Interpretation," esp. pp. 140-42; Glassman, The Translation
Debate, p. 48.
115See esp. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1965). Introductory presentations may be found in D. Terence
Langendoen, The Study of Syntax (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1969):
Ronald W. Langacker, Language and Its Structure, 2nd rev. ed. (New York:, 1969);
Robert P. Stockwell, Foundations of Syntactic Theory (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice
Hall, 1977). For the philosophical implications and roots of this theory, see
Jerrold J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and Its Philosophical Import
(New York:Harper Torchbooks, 1971).
116Nida and Taber, Theory and Practice, p. 33 and passim.

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104 The.ory and Method in Bible Translation
The philosophy of language upon which the ABS bases itself stretches the
theory from which it derives in critical ways and, as a consequence, cannot rely
on the theory it marshals in its support. Chomsky's theory does not actually
identify the level of conceptualization and the deep-strucLurc of language.117 The
deep-structure of a language encodes the ideas of a speaker, but there is no
certainty that thought and language are commensurate. Moreover, although
Chomsky posits a finite repertoire of linguistic structures for all languages, he
does not claim that the substantive aspects of language - e.g., tenses and moods
of the verb, lexical denotations and connotations - are universal, only their
formal representation.118 Nida and Taber seem to acknowledge this when they
allow that "each language has its own genius" and that different languages
segment reality differently.119 By saying this they edge themselves
philosophically over toward the linguistic theory of Humboldt and others, a
position taken by Franz Rosenzweig, too (see below). Indeed, they appear to lose
the ground beneath their method. They compensate only inadequately by
disparaging the stylistic nuances and connotations of particular linguistic forms.
Their assertion that "anything that can be said in one language can be said in
another" is compromised by a crucial subordinate clause: "unless the form is an
essential element of the message."120 As we saw above, howevec, form is not
separable from meaning. t•To preserve the content of the message," they say,
"the form must be changed."121 To make any sort of translation, they are right
- form must be changed. But it is only their wishful profession that in
translation the message remains the same. It does not.
Behind the Buber-Rosenzweig renderings a battery of discrete, self-sufficient
rationales - literary, linguistic, and theological - is arrayed. Because the basis of
their translational mode is so multifacted, would-be critics would have to attack
it on all sides, not only on one. In fact, though, most discussion of the Buber
Rosenzweig translation, pro and con, has limited itself to the literary aspect.122
117Cf. Steiner, After Babel. pp. lOOff.

118Cf. P. F. Strawson, "Take the B Train," New York Review of Books 26/6 (April
19, 19 79), p. 36.
119Nida and Taber, Theory and Practice, pp. 3-4, 20-22.
120Jbid., pp. 4-S. As noted above, Nida seems to have become more sensitive to
the more rhetorical and connotative features of language in the more recent
exposition. de Waard and Nida, From One Language to Another. Yet. even here it
is "form" that is blamed for obstruction in translation: "The loss of meaning in
translation is largely proportionate to the ex.tent that a meaning is carried by the
form" (p. 44). Form must always make a difference in meaning. Despite de Waard
and Nida's increased attention to form, it is still important to examine the earlier
formulation of Nida's linguistic philosophy because it is that theory that
undergirds the TEV translation, which is the subject of discussion both in this
chapter and in Chapter Seven.
121 Ibid., pp. 5-6.
122This is so, for example of Walter Kaufmann, "Buber's Religious Significance,"
in Paul A. Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber

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Theories of Mc:xlern Bible Translation 105
This is not hard to understand. Not only does this side appear most pronounced
and intelligible, it is the one that most motivated Buber. the better known of the
two partners. If one compares the respective essays in Die Schrift by Buber on
the one hand and by Rosenzweig on the other. and then examines the
correspondence between the two on their collaborative translation, which Everett
Fox has brought to light,123 one gains the impression that Buber's interest was
chiefly literary while Rosenzweig's was philosophical, and that Buber may have
only superficially grasped the linguistic-philosophical background that
Rosenzweig brought to their project. I do not mean to fault Buber for this; he
urged Rosenzweig to work with him precisely on account of the latter's expertise
in the theory and practice of translation. It is just that in order to appreciate the
difficult, sometimes disconcerting mode in which Buber and Rosenzweig
translated, one must also attend to Rosenzweig's philosophy of language.124 It
was Rosenzweig's theory of language that decisively shaped the joint
translation.125
Knowing that a translator cannot duplicate all the linguistic and stylistic
features of a text, Schleiermacher had advised the traducer to select for special
treatment those features that strike him as most expressive and significant.126
Buber and Rosenzweig followed this program. For them the most outstanding
quality of the Hebrew Bible was its intention to be declaimed, its
"spokenness."127 Buber and Rosenzweig sought to confect a translation that
would by its very nature be voiced. Historical and anthropological thinking from
the eighteenth century on had come to recognize that ancient literature in general
was designed for oral performance. "Read Homer as if he were singing in the
(LaSalle, IL: Open Court. 1967), esp. pp. 670-77; Tigay, "On Translating the
Torah;• esp. p. 18; Shemaryahu Talmon, "Martin Buber's Ways of Interpreting the
Bible:• JJSt 27 (1976), pp. 195-209; Michael Fishbane, "Martin Buber as an
Interpreter of the Bible," Judaism 27/2 (Spring 1978), pp. 184-95; and the several
essays of Everett Fox. e.g., "Technical Aspects," and .. A Buber-Rosenzweig Bible
in English," Amsterdamse cahiers voor exegese en Bijbelse thtwlogie 2 (1981),
ft 9-22.
Fox, 'Technical Aspects."
124Cf., e.g.• Rivka G. Horwitz, °Franz Rosenzweig on Language.'' Judaism 13
(1964), pp. 393-406; Billigheimer, "On Jewish Translations," p. 17.
125cr. Fox, '*Technical Aspects," esp. pp. 153-54.
126Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods," p. 13.
127See Buber, Die Schrift, e.g., pp. 56ff., 140; Rosenzweig, ibid., e.g., pp. 76-87,
124; cf. Everett Fox. "We Mean the Voice: The Buber-Rosenzweig Translation of
the Bible," Response 12 (Winter 1971-72), pp. 29-42; idem, In the Beginning:
An English Rendition of the Book of Genesis== Response 14 (Summer 1972), pp.
143-59 [cf. now the introduction to In the Beginning (New York: Schocken,
1983)); idem, "Technical Aspects," pp. 10-11 and passim; idem, '*The Samson
Cycle in an Oral Setting," alcheringa 4/1 (1978), pp. Sl-68, esp. p. 51;
Kingsley. "The Buber-Rosenzweig Translation, p. 17; Billigheimer, "On Jewish
11
Translations," p. 18; Talmon, "Martin Buber's Ways," pp. 202-3; Fishbane,

"Martin Buber.'' pp. 185-86, 189-90.

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streets," said Herder in the late eighteenth century.128 Nietzsche saw "a rebirth
of the art of hearing" in the nineteenth century,129 and this regained faculty
made an indelible impress on the study of Biblical poetry, too.130 Today, the
oral character of the Hebrew Bible is axiomatic in most quarters,13l and its
adherents include the American Bible Society.l3 2 For Buber, to achieve a
speaking rendering of Scripture serves a second, Jewish purpose: it sustains the
tradition of reading the text aloud.133 For both Buber and Rosenzweig, though,
the most important reason for spokenness was theological: the divine voice
speaks through the words of the text. A voice is best heard. not visualized in
prinL The Biblical narrator must be furnished the means of immediately affecting
his hearer, to "address him and make his ears prick up in his full spiritual and
living present."134
To imbue their translation with spokenness, Buber divided the text into
breath-lengths, corresponding to the natural punctuation of discourse by
breathing. 135 It had been assumed, at least since the writing of the French
epistemologist Condillac in the early eighteenth century, that language itself
originates in breath-long, primal utterances - an idea that in the Romantic period
crystallized in the widespread principle that rhythm is the most elemental
ingredient of poetry and that rhythm, as the immediate capsule of perception,
enables poetry to recapitulate the most primitive sensations of natural man and
woman.136 The theory often holds, too, that ancient verse was recited as part of
128Cited in Francis B. Gummere. The Beginnings of Poetry (New York: Macmillan,
1901), p. 52. On Herder and his relation to Vico, see Isaiah Berlin. Vico and
Herder (New York: Viking. 1976).
129Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books. 1969). p. 295.
130cr.. e.g., Johann G. von Herder. The Spirit of Hebrew PoeJry, trans. J. Marsh
(Burlington: Edward Smith. 1833). For Herder·s contributions to Biblical studies,
see Thomas Willi, Herders Beitrag zum Verstehen des alten Testaments (TObingen:
J. C. B. Mohr, 1971).
131 Cf., e.g., Theodor H. Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament
(New York: Harper & Row, 1969). p. xlvii: "Popular literature is heard, rather than
read, and the influence of recitation is present everywhere in the Old Testament:'
132Cf., e.g., Nida and Taber, Theory and Practice. pp. 28-31.
133Buber, Die Schrift, p. 141.
134Rosenzweig, Die Schrift, p. 245.
135cr.. e.g., Fox. ''Technical Aspects," p. 32; idem, "The Samson Cycle." p. 52a.
Rosenzweig accredits this technique to Buber in Die Schrift, pp. 80-81; cf. Fox,
"A Buber-Rosenzweig Bible in English," p. 21, n. 8; see there, pp. 10-11, for an
excellent illustration of how the division of the text into breath-lengths
highlights the text's ironic use of language. Note also Rosenzweig, The Star of
Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 197.
1 36See Hans Aarsleff. From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982), esp. p. 288. Cf. Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music
(London, 1893), e.g., p. 234: "The power exerted over us by any rhythmical
movement lies in its being adjusted to the form in which ideas and feelings
succeed each other in our mind." Cf. esp. "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry"

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a dance-like ritual in which the participants- the bard and his cohort- worked
up a loud, pulsating rhythm of breathing.13 7 By means of reproducing the
Bible's rhythms, Buber and Rosenzweig hoped not only to resuscitate the
cultural context of Scripture but above all simply to translate faithfully. "Every
language has its own peculiarities of rhythm, for prose as well as for poetry:' as
Schleiermacher had said, l38 and it is the responsibility of the translator to
imitate the cadences of Hebrew.139
In a similar vein, Buber and Rosenzweig sought to somehow duplicate the
pervasive assonance and wordplay of the Bible in German.140 The Bible, they
perceived, communicates not only through semantics but also through sound, as
speech transmits sense through tone of voice. This technique has been
successfully assimilated by Buber-Rosenzweig's American heir, Everett Fox. In
the following two instances Fox has captured two Hebrew wordplays that Buber
himself failed to convey in the Book of Jonah:
But HE hurled a great wind upon the sea,
and a great storm was on the sea,
so that the ship was on the brink of breaking up. (1:4)
Now Yona had gone down...
and had gone to sleep. (1:5)141
But the by far more significant kind of repetition that Buber and Rosenzweig
found in the text was that of words and word-stems, the well·known "leading.
words.'' Leitworter, which by their recurrence function to underscore a theme or
motif or associate disparate verses or passages.142 In order to convey these
in Gummere. The Beginnings of Poetry, pp. 30-115. Note in particular Gummere's

citation of the Biblicist, Karl Budde, on p. 62.
1 37 See Gummere, ibid., p. 100, n. 3; cf. Fox, '*We Mean the Voice.'' p. 31.
138 Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods," p. 27.
139 Cf., e.g. Buber, Die Schrift, p. 57. For a slightly later appeal by a Biblicist to
attempt to reproduce the text's rhythm in translation, cf. R. Toumay, "Poesie
biblique et traduction fran�aise, un essai: le psaume XI," RB 53 (1946), pp. 349-
64, esp. 352-53. See also Henri Meschonnic, "Translating Biblical Rhythm," in
David H. Hirsch and N. Aschkenasy. eds., Biblical Patterns in Modern Literature
(Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. 22740.
140E.g., Buber, Die Schrift, pp. 152ff.; cf. Fox, ''Technical Aspects," e.g., pp. 39,
45-46. For an appreciation of the importance of capturing assonance in

translation, cf. Robert Martin-Achard, "An Exegete Confronting Genesis 32:23-
33," in Roland Barthes et al., Structural Analysis and Biblical Exegesis
(Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1974), esp. p. 39.
141 E. Fox, "Yona: An English Rendition," Response 22 (Summer 1974), pp. 7-17,
here p. 7.
1 42 See esp. Buber's essay, "Leitwortstil in der Enihlung des Pentateuchs," Die
Schrift, pp. 211-38; a Hebrew version appears in Buber's w,po ',r, ,:,-,., [The Bible's
Way] (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1964), pp. 284-99. Cf., e.g.• Fox, "Technical
Aspects," pp. 48-67; Nahum N. Glatzer, "Buber as an Interpreter of the Bible." in
Schilpp and Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber, esp. pp. 362-68;

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108 Theory and Methcxl in Bible Translation
meaningful repetitions Buber and Rosenzweig, for the most part, rendered
Hebrew stems by the same German stem even in contexts where the German
word was partly inapposite. It is this word-for-word, "concordant" translation
technique that most disturbs the ABS and other idiomatic translators.143 We
have observed one of the battlegrounds (in 2 Samuel 7) above. In this the ABS
follows an innovation of the KJV, which imposed on the Hebrew text its own
stylistic predilection for variety in diction.144 Idiomatic translators have
honorably felt the need to carry on the fight against the medieval conception of
language that gave rise to concordant rendering. That conception places the
origins of speech in the mouth of Adam and views all subsequent linguistic
history as a development - or degeneration - of the pure, primal, God-given
Hebrew. 145 Even in the twentieth century an English rendering entitled The
Concordant Version bases itself on just that ide.a. 146 :Each Hebrew word must be
given a corresponding, fixed English one lest the primal linguistic structure be
lost. However, as we shall see, Rosenzweig had philosophical views similar to
yet crucially different from the Adamic perspective, and these views help to
underpin the "concordantu style of the Buber-Rosenzweig mode beyond its sound
literary justifications.
Translating the same word in each of its contexts acontextually, the same
way each time, rests upon another cardinal principle of the Buber-Rosenzweig
method. To connect distant verses by means of concordant translation
presupposes the unity of the text.147 The conception of literary unity, which, as
we saw above. had been articulated by Humboldt,148 became a basic
hermeneutical rule of Buber and Rosenzweig's predecessor, Wilhelm Dilthey,149
and is the keystone of contemporary structuralism. For Buber and Rosenzweig it
was more than a premise or proposition - it was their conclusion. The le.ading-
William W. Hallo, "Notes on Translation.'' Eretz Israel 16 (1982), pp. 99*-105*.

esp. 101*-2*. For the adoption of this literary analytical technique by modem
Biblicists, see my "Biblical Narratology" (see n. 49). pp. 202-3.
143Cf.. e.g., Taber. "Translation as Interpretation," and Crim, "Old Testament
Translations and Interpretation..; cf. already Friedrich Schlegel, "Dialogue on
Poetry," trans. E. Behler and R. Struc, in Willson, ed., German Romantic
Criticism, p. 121.
144Cf. Bruce, History of the Bible in English, pp. 104-5.
145 For discussion of the "Adamic.. theory of language and the philosophical war
against it. see Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, pp. 24-25 and passim; cf. also
Steiner, After Babel, pp. 58-59 and passim.
146cc. Bruce, History of the Bible in English, p. 184.
147 See Rosenzweig, "Die Einheit der Bible," Die Schrift, pp. 46-57; Buber, ibid.,
pp. 139, 168ff.• and passim; cf. Fox, "We Mean the Voice," pp. 38-39; idem,
''Technical Aspects," p. 65.
148 See above with n. 19.
149Cf. Edgar V. McKnight, Meaning in Texts: The Historical Shaping of a
Narrative Hermeneutic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), esp. p. 28. Dilthey's
major statement is Die Einbildungskraft des Dichters: Bausteine fur eine Poetik
(1887 ).

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words are guideposts to the unity that informs the entire text. They do not
imagine that the text was composed by a single author in a single period. Buber
said that he detected "a variety of voices in the chorus .. of sources that stands
behind the text. 150 Yet, in its final edited form the text comprises a wide
network of associations. A good translation should keep the network intact by
highlighting the lexical, and any other, connectors.
Words possess associations not only horizontally - in their connections
across a text - but also vertically - in their historical relations. Buber and
Rosenzweig acknowledged that a word rarely makes a clean break with its past
and for a number of reasons sought to translate words according to their
etymological or root meaning. One reason intertwines with the Leitwort: only
by translating Hebrew words according to the sense of the stem can the repetition
of various words built upon the same root appear to the audience.151 Another
reason is anthropological: the root meaning of a Hebrew word often clarifies the
psychological or theological impulse behind a term. Buber and Rosenzweig
follow the lead of the nineteenth-century German Jewish Orthodox leader,
Samson Raphael Hirsch, in rendering 1::np, typically glossed as "sacrifice." as "a
bringing nigh," which is what it suggests etymologically.152 The difference in
nuance between the two glosses needs no comment. Buber and Rosenzweig did
the same for personal names,153 which likewise wear their associations on their
sleeve, so to speak. In an oft-cited example, the name of Moses, it�o, denotes
"one who draws out (water)" despite the fact that when Pharaoh's daughter names
him n�o, she says that she had drawn him out of the water (Exod. 2:10). She
saw only a passive, helpless infant; the text in its global scope sees a heroic
deliveru.154 Without the Buber-Rosenzweig technique of providing the audience
with the text's etymology of names, such irony would be missed.
Translating etymologically could be construed as a throwback to rabbinic
midrash, which often erected linkages using etymological connections, real and
fancifuI.1 55 But Buber and Rosenzweig's more secular rationales find strong
150Buber, ..Abraham the Seer," On the Bible, p. 24. Cf. Benno Jacob, Das erste
buch der Tora: Genesis (Berlin: Schocken. 1934). p. 10 [English translation of
part of this passage in Alex Preminger and Edward L. Greenstein. The Hebrew
Bible in Literary Criticism (New York: Frederick Ungar. 1986), p. 392].
151See, e.g.. Buber, ..Replies to my Critics," in Schilpp and Friedman, eds., The
Philosophy of Martin Buber, p. 727. For a friendly critique of Buber's
etymological translation style, see James Muilenburg. "Buber as an Interpreter of
the Bible,'* in ibid., p. 387.
152See, e.g .• Buber. Die Schrift.pp. 142ff.• 157ff.; cf. Billigheimer. "On Jewish
Translations," pp. 9, 16-17; Fox, In the Beginning (1972), pp. 147-52.
153cr.. e.g.• Fox, "A Buber-Rosenzweig Bible in English:· p. 11.
154See Buber, Moses (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), pp. 35-36; James S.
Ackerman, "The Literary Context of the Moses Birth Story (Exodus 1-2)... in
Kenneth R. R. Gros Louis et al., eds.• Literary Interpretations of Biblical
Narratives (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974). pp. 94-95.
tsScf., e.g.• Barr, The Typology of Literalism, pp. 44�48.

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precedent in German Romantic criticism. For Jacob Grimm, for example, the
use of a root meaning points to the "sensual notions" out of which a word
emerged,l56 arid Schleiennacher, like Buber, urged translators to traduce ideas
according to the perceptual and expressive framework of the language of the
source. 157 Yet an ideational contact between midrash and the Buber.Rosenzweig
method may in fact exist. That contact is less historical or traditional than
philosophical. Midrash, like the Adamicists (see above), understands a name to
be more than an arbitrary, conventional designation of a thing. A name captmes
some essential significance concerning that which it denominates. Thus, it is
God who gives the names, since it is God who knows the essences.1 5 8
Rosenzweig, in his philosophy of language, tries to pull the two antithetical
positions - naming as convention and naming as divine creation - together. As
so often in Rosenzweig's thought, the strands that make up the web of the
thinking do not reach far enough to make contact on their own. But they course
through Rosenzweig's mind like nervous impulses traversing a synapse, powered
by his faith in the great enabler, God.
When one seeks out Rosenzweig's rationale for translating as he and Buber
did, one finds that his theory of translation rests, as it should, on the wide base
of a linguistic philosophy. Thus, in explaining the need for etymological
translation Rosenzweig pays little mind to literary devices or anthropological
authenticity. He penetrates to the philosophical core, to Language itself: at the
root level of languages the diverse languages of the world share a common
domain and structure. The translator must probe to this most basic. universal
level of language. Only at that level can translation take place.159 So far, this
may sound like the translational philosophy of the American Bible Society. But
at this point Rosenzweig and Eugene Nida would surely part company. Language
with a capital "L" can, according to Rosenzweig, say whatever is conceived, but
- and here is the pivotal point - languages cannot. All languages combined can
just about say anything. In collusion they asymptotically approximate
Language, the language of God. That doesn't sound like Nida. but it does recall
Herder, his teacher Hamann, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and especially
Rosenzweig's younger contemporaries Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and
in many respects Ludwig Wittgenstein. In more recent times Benjamin's outlook
has been revived by Jacques Derrida.160
IS6Jacob Grimm, "On the Origin of Language," in Willson, ed.• German Romantic
Criticism, pp. 281-82; cf. also Herder, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.
1S7Schleiermacher, "On the Different Methods," pp. 25-26.
lSScf. Heinemann, n·u--.-, ,:,-,-,, pp. 11-12. For Kabbalistic influence on the
seventeenth-century Adamicists, see Aarsleff. From Locke, to Saussure, pp. 60.
281.
159Rosenzweig, Die Schrift, p. 125; cf. his The Star, p. 126.
160Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 91-161.

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The human is the speaking animal (a notion as old as Hesiod with roots in
Kabbala as well, where the human is designated by the term medabber, "the
speaking-one").161 Out of one's perceptions of things one utters names,
invented not altogether arbitrarily but not capturing the essence of the things
either.162 The true names, embodying universal essences, are known only to
God; they are:
...the archetypal words [which]...lie hidden under each and every manifest
word as secret bases and...rise to the light in it. In a certain sense they
are elemental words which constituted the manifest course of speech... .ln
living speech, these inaudible arch-words became audible as real
words...real language. Those inaudible elemental words, standing side by
side without relationship, were the language of the protocosmos, lying
side by side.163
This assumption of words more elemental than human words, the words of God,
resolves a paradox in Genesis 1, a text that underwent exegesis in the philosophy
161Cf. Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 110: "Man became man when he first spoke." For
Hesiod and Aristotle, cf. Steiner, L anguage and Silence, p. 36; for Kabbal� cf.
Gershom Scholem, "Kabba!�" Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter, 1971), vol.
10, col. 610. For the notion. with a slight twist, in Heidegger, cf. George Steiner,
Martin Heidegger (New York: Penguin, 1980), esp. pp. 30-31, 50ff.; McKnight,
Meaning in Texts, pp. 39-53.
162Cf. esp. Walter Benjamin, *'On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,"
Reflections, ed. P. Demetz, trans. E. Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 314-32, esp. 324-25. It is worth noting here that
Benjamin's and Rosenzweig's twin theories of language and translation are
strikingly similar; see also Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator." Although
Benjamin had read Rosenzweig's The Star prior to composing the latter essay, and
although the two had met once, uneventfully (see Benjamin, Briefe, ed. G.
Scholem and T. W. Adorno [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), vol. 1. pp. 195-96),
Benjamin's ideas on translation had been developed by 1916. when he wrote the
former essay. Nor was Rosenzweig in The Star aware of Benjamin's essay, which
remained unpublished until 1955. Rosenzweig and Benjamin drew on the same
philosophical sources - Benjamin had studied Wilhelm von Humboldt's linguistic
philosophy and had contemplated anthologizing Humboldt's writing on language
(cf. G. Scholem, Walter Benjamin - die Geschichte einer Freundschaft [Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1975], pp. 33, 175; cf. idem, "Two Letters to Walter Benjamin.'' On
Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. W. J. Dannhauser [New York: Schock.en, 1976], p.
241). Perhaps more poignantly. both Rosenzweig and Benjamin, like Kafka,
hoped for a redemption through language - through Hebrew even - from their
German-Jewish alienation. Cf. George Steiner, "Introduction" to W. Benjamin, The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 13.
On Kafka's alienation as Jew and attraction to Hebrew, see Marthe Robert, As
Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1982).
For a brief sketch of Benjamin's thinking on language subsequent to the 1916
essay, see Anson Rabinbach, "Introduction to Walter Benjamin's 'Doctrine of the
Similar'," New German Critique 11 (Spring 1979), pp. 60-64.
163Rosenzwcig, The Star, p. 109.

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of both Rosenzweig and Benjamin.164 When God creates light, he sayst "Let
there be light," speaking the name, light. of something that he had not yet
brought into existence. God has the name in hand prior to the existence of that
which the name signifies. Heidegger transforms this notion into his idea that
things do not become perceptible, they cannot "thing," until they are named.
Naming differentiates that which is into discrete, nameable things.165 But for
Rosenzweig the lesson is more blatant1yl66 theological: God uses language and
through revelation shares this language with humanity:
The word as heard and as spoken is one and the same. The ways of God
are different from the ways of man. but the word of God and the word of
man are the same. What man hears in his heart as his own human speech
is the very word which comes out of God's mouth.1 67
Human speech begins when one person seeks to do that which is naturally
divine and human - to encounter the other and overcome one's isolation by
addressing the other, an I to a Thou.168 Despite the universal foundation of
Langua e, each one's perceptions and linguistic formulation of experience may
i
differ.1 9 Different people name things differently because these namings emerge
from different encounters. Only God can encounter all the world simultaneously
and possess a unified language, a single roster of names. Speech can only arise
meaningfully in dialogue, and thought cannot proceed without speech. Thus,
Rosenzweig adopted the notion of "speech-thinking" - not that thought and
speech are coterminous, but we have no handle on thought unless we speak our
164Rosenzweig, The Star, pp. 151-55; Benjamin, "On Language," pp. 326-30.
165Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New
York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 189-210, esp. 198-203.
166 Steiner discusses the ambiguous theological thrust of Heidegger's philosophy in
Martin Heidegger, pp. 62-63.
167Rosenzweig, The Star, p. 151.
168Innocent readers should not assume that Rosenzweig acquired the philosophy of
I-Thou from its most famous exponent, Martin Buber. The notion has its roots in
the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin at the tum of the nineteenth century and had been
formulated fuUy later in that century by Ludwig Feuerbach. Cf. N. N. Glatzer's
"Foreword" to The Star, pp. xiv-xv; Richard Unger, Holderlin's Major Poetry: The
Dialectics of Unity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. 15. The
social drive behind speech is stressed notably by HOlderlin and Humboldt; cf.
Aarsleff, From Locke To Saussure, p. 343; N. N. Glatter, "Introduction," to Franz
Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and
God (New York: Noonday, 1953), pp. 16-17.
169Cf., e.g.• Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the
Sublime, trans. J. A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), who delineates in
the former essay different types of personality and sensibility; and, more
ftmdamentally. Herder's view that differences in language reflect different shades of
experience; see Berlin, Vico and Herder, p. 170.

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thoughts. l 70 We do not, however, merely speak or name. For Heidegger,
speaking is an anonymous activity: Language speaks.171 For Benjamin, naming
itself is the purest act of speech, for it produces knowledge. To speak to the
other is to debase and exploit language in order to control the other.172
Rosenzweig understands that we tailor each of our utterances for a particular
Thou in a particular meeting.
Everyone must translate and everyone does translate. Whoever speaks is
translating his thoughts for the comprehension he expects from the
other.173
From a neurological standpoint, the equation of speech and translation was ill
advised; speech and the ability to translate are quite discrete faculties.17 4
Nonetheless, as metaphor the equation makes clear that for Rosenzweig we each
speak a different language; yet, we strive to bend our language toward our
interlocutor.1 75
The function of language to connect with the w orld stands out by
contrasting it with its dysfunction, tragedy. The tragic hero is isolated, and his
isolation expresses itself in speechlessness.176
17°For discussions of Rosenzweig's "speech.thinking" and its place in his thought,

see. e.g., Nahum N. Glatter, "l"'Tl¥lm ',v � .,,,,,IX'l W"'0l1m nu10"'1" [Languages and
Hebrew in Particular in Rosenzweig's Philosophy), in Baruch Kurzweil, ed., '" ?li'
(S. Y. Agnon Festschrift; Ramat-Gan. 1958), pp. 229.36; Horwitz, "Franz
Rosenzweig on Language.'' Herc, too, Benjamin and Heidegger are on the same
wavelength. Cf. also the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein; see Gerd Brand, ed.,
The Essential Wittgenstein, trans. R. E. Innis (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
pp. 53.65, esp. p. 53; copntrast the earlier thinking of Wittgenstein in his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 19. Rosenzweig opposed especially the
philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, who contended that thinking and speaking are
essentially different in nature; cf., e.g., Hegel, On Art, Religion, and Philosophy,
trans. J. G. Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 31, 35, 153-54, and
assim.
y.71
Cf. Heidegger. Poetry, Langllage, Thought, pp. 190-91. 195, 197.
172Benjamin, ..On Language," esp. pp. 317-18, 327 .30. In this regard he follows
Nietzsche; cf. Danto. Nietzsche as Philosopher, esp. p. 120; Anson Rabinbach,
"Critique and Commentary/Alchemy and Chemistry: Some Remarks on Walter
Benjamin...," New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979). p. 6. For a neo-Nietzschean
deprecation of the tendentious use of language, cf. the novelist John Barth: "we
converse to convert"; New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1982, p. 3.
173Rosenzweig, Die Schrift, p. 88, as translated in Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, p.
255.
174Cf. Martin L. Albert and Loraine K. Ohler. The Bilingual Brain:
Neuropsychological and Neurolingllistic Aspects of Bilingualism (New York:
1978). pp. 217-20.
17SRosenzweig, The Star, p. 81; Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, p. 59.
176Rosenzweig, The Star, esp. p. 77; cf. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, pp. 107ff.• who develops Rosenzweig's concept. Contrast to Rosenzweig's

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The languages of individuals each capture fragments of perception and
insight. The more people truly communicate, the richer the conversants'
language will become.177 The more that people with something to say say it
strikingly, the more language will fulfill its potential to express an that can be
expressed.178 It follows, then, that no language can increase its expressiveness
without growing, without incorporating the features of other languages.
Language contains within it all languages, and it is the goal of those who desire
to attain the greatest expressiveness and knowledge to make of each translation
an expansion of the translation language by incorporating features of the source
language. Ultimately, aU languages will merge into the all-expressive language
of God. This is the upshot of the essays on translation by Schleiermacher,
Rosenzweig,179 Benjamin, and - now - Derrida.180 There can be no real
translation, if what is meant is the transfer of what a text says to another
language.181 The words don't match. German brot and French pain, as Benjamin
hopeful vision the tragic one of Franz Kafka; cf. Glatzer's "Introduction" to
Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, pp. 19-20.
177Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, p. 59.
178Rosenzweig, in Glatzer. Franz Rosenzweig, p. 253; cf. Schleiennacher, '*On the
Different Methods," p. 6; Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, pp. 9 8-99.
179See esp. Glatzer. Franz Rosenzweig, pp. 252-54 from "Nachwort." in Franz
Rosenzweig, Jehuda Halevi (Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1927), pp. 153-68.
180Demda. The Ear of the Other, esp. pp. 119-24. Cf., e.g., the following excerpt
(pp. 122-23):
Translation augments and modifies the original, which insofar as it is
living on, never ceases to be transfonned and to grow. It modifies the
original even as it also modifies the translating language. This process -
transforming the original as well as the translation - is the translation
contract between the original and the translating text .... Benjamin
explains that translation reveals in some way the kinship of languages -
a kinship that...is of another order....How, then, can translation assure
the growth - what he calls the "hallowed growth .. - of languages and the
kinship among languages? By trying to fulfill that impossible contract
to reconstitute, not the original, but the larger ensemble....This
impossible possibility [of translation] nevertheless holds out the
promise of the reconciliation of tongues. Hence the messianic character
of translation.
181Cf. Derrida. ibid., pp. 123-24:
A translation never succeeds in the pure and absolute sense of the tenn.
Rather, a translation succeeds in promising success, in promising
reconciliation....A translation puts us not in the presence but in the
presentiment of what "pure language" is, that is, the fact that there is
language, that language is language... that there is a plurality of
languages which have that kinship with each other coming from their
being languages.

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points out,182 both denote "bread," but they do not convey that information
from the same perspective. The terms of one language interconnect in a unique
system, and that system cannot be found in another language.183 One translates
root meanings because each language's gloss of the more abstract arch-word
succeeds in covering at least a part of a concept.
The Bible speaks in Hebrew. The sense of Scripture, then, cannot be
conveyed faithfully in any other language. Biblical Hebrew forms a system of
unique interconnections, and for Rosenzweig, Hebrew itself becomes a medium
of special epxressiveness, the language of the holy.184 (For the idiomatic
translators of the American Bible Society, conveniently, Hebrew is an ordinary
language, convertible into any other.)185 The Biblical translator can therefore
take two legitimate tacks: to Hebraize the language of translation and to drive
readers of the translation to the original.186 Rosenzweig had seen the ways in
which Hebrew had been insinuated into the German language through Luther's
translation.187 English has been forever changed by the Hebraicisms of the
Tyndale and King James Version.188 He determined to ply modem German into
expressing itself, in some respects, not as German had but as Gennan could - by
speaking Hebraically.189 By continuing the translation alone in the post-Nazi
period Buber knew that he was offering his gift to the language of Germany's
cultural past. Indeed, Pope John Paul II praised the Buber-Rosenzweig translation
as a great Jewish contribution to German culture.190
182Benjamin. "The Task of the Translator," p. 74; cf. Wittgenstein. in Cyril

Barrett. ed.• Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology
and Religious Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 29.
183Schleiermacher. "On the Different Methods." p. 25; cf. Herder's view in Berlin,
Vico and Herder, pp. 188-89. Note also the view of modem structural linguists;
cf .• e.g., William G. Doty, "Linguistics and Biblical Criticism.'' JAAR 41 (1973),
ff-4 114-21.
Cf ., e.g., Rosenzweig, The Star, pp. 301-2; idem, in Glatzer. F r a nz
Rosenzweig, pp. 263-71. Interestingly, what Hebrew is for Rosenzweig is more or
less what Greek is for Heidegger; cf. Steiner. Martin Heidegger, pp. 19ff., 45ff.
185Cf. Nida and Taber. Theory and Practice, pp. 6-7. The later formulation by de
Waard and Nida, From One Language to Another, does acknowledge that each
language comprises a unique set of semantic interrelations.
186Cf.• e.g.• Glatzer, *'n''"l:lm1 nu,irt,n," p. 233; Stem, "Translating the Ancients," p.
51b. Note that Rosenzweig prefaces the "Nachwort .. to his Yehuda Halevi
translations with an epigraph from von Stollberg's translation of the Illiad -
bidding the reader to learn the original and destroy the translation.
187Rosenzweig, Die Schrift, pp. 95-96.
188Cf. Steiner. ''The Book.'' Language and Silence, p. 189; Bruce, History of the
Bible in English, p. 121; Richard G. Moulton, The Modern Stwdy of Literature
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 469-70.
189Cf. also Hallo, "Notes on Translation," pp. 100•.101•.
1 90"Pope Meets with West German Jews," New York Times, Nov. 18, 1980, p.
A16.

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Rosenzweig knew they could achieve both objectives - H ebraization of
German and dependence on the original - at one deft stroke: through a type of
literal translation. "The Holy language demands to be understood, word for
word.*'191 The literalism would mold the German in Hebraic constructions, and
the awkwardness of the result would compel serious readers to look into the
Hebrew. What was needed was a literalism that would preserve the Hebrew
images and idioms, the root meanings of words, the morphology of the words,
the cadences, the syntax. No wonder that John Berryman, as we saw above,
esteemed literalism and admired Hebrew. In his own poetry he manipulates
English in ways that smack of Hebraic construction. As Hebrew builds both
nouns and verbs from the same root, so does Berryman, for whom "to child," "to
raven," and "to gounnandize" are verbs, and for whom "the hear" is a noun. Note
also his supple, quasi-Hebraic syntax: "Six at a time, or so, built he fires
under. l92 English learns to speak in the manner of Hebrew.
It
Buber and Rosenzweig did not simply traduce word for word. To see that
their German is not merely a mechanical literalism, one need only compare their
renderings with a truly slavish and artless reproduction such as one finds in the
Medieval German Jewish translations.193 Compare on Gen. 37:5:
Hebrew: Dffl"P'!'tt,n,,
Medieval: un' es trauml Josef ein traum.
B-R: Josef traumte einen traum.
English: Joseph dreamed a dream.
Or compare on Gen. 27:34:
Hebrew: l'ml Mp.JJ¥ p.11¥"1...
Medieval: un' er schrei schreiwig gross...
B-R: schrie er einen schrei einen ilbergrossen...
English: he cried a great crying...
The Medieval rendering takes no account of producing some sort of sentence in
German; Buber and Rosenzweig do.
191 Rosenzweig, in Glatzer, Franz Rosenrweig, p. 268. Cf. Benjamin. ''The Task of
the Translator," p. 82: "The interlinear [i.e., word-for-word) version of the
Scriptures is the prototype or ideal of all translation."
192Examples from John Berryman, "Cantatrice. in Theodore Solotaroff, ed., New
"
American Review #3 (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. 105; idem,
Henry's Fate and Other Poems, 1967-1972 (New York: Farrar. Strauss & Giroux,
1977), pp. 26. 64, 21, 64. For a discussion of Benyman's artful use of language,
see Muffy E. A. Siegel, "The Original Crime': John Berryman's Iconic Grammar,..
Poetics Today 2/la (Autumn 1980), pp. 163-88:.
193The difference is noted by Leibowitz, Die Uberstzungstechnik, pp. 65-72. The
examples are taken from there, pp. 69-70.

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But they want German to do that which Hebrew can. Hebrew can burnish an
image by repeating a word, so should Gennan. This. for example, is one of the
characteristics of Hebrew that Yiddish melded into German.194 In Yiddish one
can say "a going have I gone" (i.e., "I took a walk" - geyn bin ikh gegangen) or
"a taking he has taken me" (i.e., "he took me" - nemen hot er mikh
genumen).195 Hebrew can, as we noted, construct nouns and verbs from the
same stem; Buber and Rosenzweig derived nouns from verbs and verbs from
nouns in German; e.g., Braus, "a rushing," from brausen, "to rush"; Gespross,
"a sprouting," from spriessen, "to sprout";fruchten, "to bear fruit," from Frucht,
tffruit." 196 Hebrew forms verbs by combining stems with affixes; once
combined they are indivisible. In idiomatic German many verbs must separate
stem from prefix, but Buber and Rosenzweig will have German, like Hebrew,
resist such a violation of unity: ansag (not sag...an) den Sohnen Jissraels,
"announce to the sons of Israel't; augstieg (not stieg ...auf) Mosche zu Gott,
"Moses climbed up to God."197
To accommodate the nuances or tone of a Hebrew word Buber and
Rosenzweig would often search through the history of German for the right
gloss, and so their rendering abounds in archaic diction and constructions: Und
Licht war for es werde Licht, "there was lightn ; walten for uto rule"; zollen, "to
tender to."198 When the right word wasn't there, they would invent it:
Sonderschatz, "special treasure" (Hebrew n':m0); abhegen, "to fence in" (Heb.
',•:»,); steingesteinigen, "to stone by stone.. (Heb. ',pO" "'P0).199 They would
even concoct unprecedented German idioms and syntax in order to represent
Hebrew deployment of word-order and prepositions. Yet, they were also sensitive
to tone, to the proper decorum of relating to God. In Exod. 19:9 Buber
Rosenzweig render i'lM with melden, "to report," not with ansagen, "to
announce," as in verse 3. Why this transgression of their commitment to
consistency? The solution is certainly that ansagen would not do for Mosest
announcing to God because it has the connotation of "commanding/' and Moses
cannot command God. This example shows, too, the impossibilities of
translating even following the Buber-Rosenzweig method. As Rosenzweig had
1940n the question of Yiddish influence in Buber-Rosenzweig's German translation.
see Hallo, "Notes on Translation," p. 100*.
195Thanks to my informant. David Roskies. John Milton adapted this Hebraic
feature in his ··Biblical" poem, "Samson Agonistes":
Dagon, ...their god who hath delivered
Thee, Samson, bound and blind into their [the Philistines') hands -
Them out of thine, who slew'st them many a slain (lines 437-39).
196Examples from the Buber-Rosenzweig rendering of Genesis 1 in Die Schrift
(Berlin: Lambert Schneider, 1926- ).
t97Examples from ibid., on Exodus 19.
191Examples from ibid., on Genesis 1 and Psalm 29.
l99Examples from ibid.• on Exodus 19.

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written, "Only one who is profoundly convinced of the impossibility of
translation can really undertake it. 200 0
Since, in this view. translation is a mirage. the transfer of the Bible to

another language must serve as no more than an aid to hearing the Biblical text.
The Buber-Rosenzweig theory of translation produces language that can be read
only with effort - like all great literature and the Bible itself. Walter Benjamin
reportedly disliked the Buber-Rosenzweig rendering,201 recoiling perhaps at its
foreignness. But after all, Buber and Rosenzweig had put into effect that which
Benjamin, too, had philosophized. It may be that, as Rosenzweig said in another
connection, "when one hears one's own ideas uttered by someone else, they
suddenly become problematic."202 True, it is hard to imagine an audience bent
on utilizing an unidiomatic rendering such as the Buber-Rosenzweig. Yet, such a
style of translation may be especially well suited for those who approach the
Bible as holy. When a translation sounds like a translation it constantly reminds
one that the translation is but a mask of the sacred text that lies behind it. To
read a good rendition in the Buber-Rosenzweig mode is somehwat like Moses
standing barefoot before the Burning Bush, perceiving that something other
dwells behind the f3';ade. Most people would feel more comfortable in sandals t
so to speak, sparing themselves the irritation of the hot sand and rock. But
religion requires a shedding of the sandals - of contemporary idiom - to
experience the sacred - (in this case) the Hebraic. For Buber and Rosenzweig the
Gennanizing of the Bible was a spiritual act, peeling away a layer of German
idiom so that the faint voice of the Hebrew could become more audible.
20°Cited in Hallo. loc. cit.

201 0. Scholem, "Walter Benjamin," On Jews and Judaism, pp. 193-94.
202Rosenzweig, in Glatter. Franz Rosenzweig. p. 242.

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Chapter Title: Theories of Modern Bible Translation

Book Title: Essays on Biblical Method and Translation

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzpv5k8.11

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Exwn, "Literary Patterns in the Samson Saga: An Investigation of Rhetorical Style

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In diametrical (theoretical) opposition to this JX)Sture is the modern concept

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The TEV buries the motif in its "idiomatic" rendering:

20Georges de Buffon, cited in Alphonse M. de Lamartine, Cours familier de

Ginsberg, "Lexicographical Notes," SVT 16 (1967), p. 80.

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interrupted, then repeated and completed or extended in the second line.26 It is

The "idiomatic" versions of the NEB and TEV render:

They dissolve the pattern altogether.

He reasoned further that:

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But An American Translation, or the "Chicago Bible," which tends toward

We wouldn't say it that way, but Amos more or less did.

300ppenheim, "Can These Dry Bones Live? - An Essay on Translating Akkadian

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79Cf. Price. A Palpable God, pp. 56-57.

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86Reported in the New York Times, Feb. 1, 1981, p. A14.

e�. pp. 137-38.

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l 08cf., e.g., the admirable discussion of the problems of translation in John

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117Cf. Steiner, After Babel. pp. lOOff.

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Translations," p. 18; Talmon, "Martin Buber's Ways," pp. 202-3; Fishbane,

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in Gummere. The Beginnings of Poetry, pp. 30-115. Note in particular Gummere's

45-46. For an appreciation of the importance of capturing assonance in

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William W. Hallo, "Notes on Translation.'' Eretz Israel 16 (1982), pp. 99*-105*.

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17°For discussions of Rosenzweig's "speech.thinking" and its place in his thought,

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182Benjamin. "The Task of the Translator," p. 74; cf. Wittgenstein. in Cyril

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Since, in this view. translation is a mirage. the transfer of the Bible to

20°Cited in Hallo. loc. cit.

William W. Hallo, "Notes on Translation.'' Eretz Israel 16 (1982), pp. 99-105.